'It is what I believed'

I watched the Aaronovitch interview with Blair the other night and was struck, once again, by his rhetoric of belief. "It's what I believe(d)", said with that emphasis of finality, of final appeal, offers us an ultimate token of authenticity and authority, as though there were never any questions about what one ought or ought not to believe. Tone of voice can be like a glaring light which makes everything else invisible. Should we have believed that Saddam Hussein was amassing WMD? 'Read the documents', he says. And it is true that most people thought that he must have had some. But, as the heroic Robin Cook, the French and other Europeans pointed out, this was not enough by itself as a casus belli. It was manifestly a pretext for a policy already determined on quite other grounds. Then there was the shameful misrepresentation of the French and Chirac about the famous second resolution. Blair defends himself and Bush, on the grounds that it was 'right' to 'go in' ('the right thing to do', like what he 'believed', in which all the rhetorical weight is placed upon the emphatic intonation of these phrases, rather than on the supporting facts of the case, the reasons that would normally clinch and justify their use, but where (in this case) the reasons are so slippery and shifting that no one would keep up with them or find them persuasive: as I recall there was a period in which official justifications altered almost daily as previous ones were challenged in the press). And although he says candidly enough that the horrors of subsequent events weigh heavily upon him, and weigh on him every day, he turns things around in his favour by representing what is happening in Iraq as an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. If there is a battle between good and evil it is relatively easy to be on the side of the angels, as he so manifestly wants to be, as we all want to be. It is much more difficult to know where the angels should stand when the situation is represented more closely in terms of the complexity of the political insurgency and internecine strife which was precisely the reason so many said it was crazy to invade in the first place. This was the forethought that should have deterred the invasion. But Blair then excuses himself by saying that it is the insurgents who are to blame for the present horrors ('troubles' seems too lightweight). And, of course, as we know, Iraq is at the centre of the great war on terror because we made it so by invading. The Americans could have done things so differently after their 9/11 experience. Iraq was the terrible and calculated sin which we first commit and from which then we instinctively exculpate ourselves, because how can we see ourselves otherwise than as shoulder to shoulder with angels.